My House in Samarkand

My House in Samarkand TASHKENT, Uzbekistan July 10, 1996 By Adam Smith Albion 1. Water We are in the third week of chitta, the hottest part of the year: forty days of punishment stretching from June 26 to the night of August 4. With the temperature hovering around 104F (40C) Tashkent simmers and pulses in the heat. To make matters worse, it is si- multaneously smothered under an all-pervading blanket of dust blown in off the steppe. A deadly combination, heat and dust: the streets are full of people gasping and choking on the pavements, like fish newly hauled out of the water and gorping to death on a plank. Still, walking in the sun is preferable to being boiled like lobsters in the over- crowded busses. Tashkent is the only place know where there is scalding hot water in abundance, but regular shortages of cold. Air conditioning is extremely rare, either in homes or in public buildings. have installed the only model available, actually a type of Soviet-manufactured air-blower called the BK-1500, beside my desk in my apartment. In the other rooms, however, it remains oppressively hot. Once, sitting at the telephone in my own kitchen and glistering with perspiration, when was concentrating intently on the tiny voice at the end of the line Tashkent connections are awful, even for in-city calls the receiver began to slide in my hand from the sweat until inadvertently squeezed it, like a bar of soap, right out of my grasp. Chilla, interestingly, is also the term used to describe the forty-day period after a woman has given birth. Uzbek tradition calls for strict confinement of mother and child during chilla. Only close relatives may set eyes on the newborn, while the chitlali mother is forbidden to participate in housework or exert herself in any way. She is waited upon hand and foot and fed choice foods to restore her strength a rare quadragesimal holiday in the otherwise toilsome life of an Uzbek wife. It would be interesting to know which meaning of the word came first. In either case, chilla calls for lethargy, shelter and recuperation. Torpid passivity is the only way to survive summer in Tashkent. If the refinements of city life had caused me to forget that Uzbekistan is essentially a desert republic, situated in a hostile environment enjoying at most eight inches of rain per year, remember it now. The weather is continental, exhibiting extremes of temperature inversion: freezing in winter, blistering in summer. Life here, as in much of Central Asia, wholly depends on sources of water. All major settlements, Tashkent included, have historically been con- centrated around oases those rare islands of fertility scattered in river basins or tec- tonic troughs, wherever there is loess sufficiently irrigated to make it wet and loamy and suitable for agriculture. Otherwise, apart from some mountain spurs, Uzbekistan is the kind of place that is te- dious to cross by bus, presenting the bored traveler little of interest beyond the occa- sional sighting of a jackal or a jerboa. It is a land, about the size of California, of semi-arid steppes and deserts that offer some sparse grazing for pastoralists (mainly sedges and ephemeral blue grasses) and not much else unless you happen to fancy yourself an ex- plorer of the old school, eager to prove your mettle against the elements. At least two in- trepid souls, Dutch and Turkish, have recently crossed the Kizilkum/Karakum ["Red- sand"/"Black-sand"] deserts by camel and donkey in order to recapture the Silk Road "experience." Needless to say, they were trailed by television crews in air-conditioned jeeps carrying iceboxes. Lord Curzon, who really had the sort of authentic Turkestani ad- venture in 1888 that these men were seeking to emulate a century later, would have found them faintly ridiculous. He very sensibly rode the Transcaspian Railway, bringing his bathtub with him, and described the Karakum desert as "the sorriest waste that ever met the human eye" in his memoir of the trip, Russia in Under these circumstances, one might have expected Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Question. Tashkent to empty out in July. Not so long ago, appar- ently, Tashkent during chilla was as abandoned as Pads in Modern life in Tashkent reenacts the perennial Central summer. A sort of claustrophobia would drive Central Asian story, the search for water, by massing around the Asia's pent-up inhabitants in a Gadarene rush into the sea city's many "microclimate" fountains, which are designed more precisely, to the beaches and sanatoria of Yalta, to cast curtains of spray and coolness of evaporation over Sochi, Dagomysh and Varna. So, clearly, am not the only grateful pedestrians. By unwritten law, children under ten one fantasizing about the Black Sea. (Another destination, are permitted to strip to their underwear and bathe in marginally less popular, was the shore of Lake Issyk-Kul them. As for the rest of us, the sun beats down endlessly in Kyrgyzstan. The water there is cleaner, but chillier.) an average of 2,980 hours per year, in fact, a saturation These annual vacations, considered a Soviet citizen's of sunshine comparable to southern California's. Al- rightful due, were financially accessible to practically eve- though there are a few ice-cream parlors, the traditional rybody up to and through most of perestroika, and were Uzbek response is to sit under shelter and consume gal- typically available through one's profsoyuz (approxi- lons of steaming green tea. In theory, hot fluids bring on mately, "trade union"), which subsidized about 90 per- perspiration that cools you down. In practice, became so cent of the cost of the trip. Since the collapse of the USSR, overheated drinking tea last week that collapsed for a however, they are beyond the reach of all but the very day with sunstroke. richest. The profsoyuzy themselves are so impoverished that they are only offering package holidays (putyovki) The sunlight is blinding but, like everything in Tash- and poor ones at that- to a vast minority of their mem- kent, not quite clean; the quality of light has a unique tone bers. The only putyovki available at present seem to be 10- to it, a tinge of sepia-gray from the suspension of dust par- day stays at worker's rest homes within Uzbekistan (Ku- ticles in the air. They are deposited on everything and eve- mishkam, Khumsan, etc.), costing about $8, where every- ryone in a fine patina of dirt. For instance, the capital's one lucky enough to have secured places has complained trademark mulberry trees are in bloom. Half-naked chil- upon their return that the buildings were ill-maintained dren run through the parks rummaging for berries, while and the complimentary three meals a day were practically serious-faced babushkas, invariably wearing print dresses inedible. bought off the racks at the State Department Store (Tsum), harvest them more methodically in metal pails. But even Faced with such unappealing prospects, there are those the mulberries are grimy with dust, and many trees along who prefer to toil on without a summer break for the sake the major thoroughfares planes, chestnuts, weeping of an extra month's salary. Impaired by physical sluggish- willows look as if ash-trays have been emptied over ness and mental hebetude in offices equipped without them, their leaves and bark powdered with a sediment of even a fan, such people's work is probably worse than use- filth in which you can trace your initials with a finger. less, so have felt no guilt in wasting hours of their time drinking tea. Then there are others who find themselves think the sunstroke pushed me over the edge, and be- forced to take a holiday without wages when they are gan to have dreams about crystal waterfalls and shady turned out onto the streets by state enterprises relieved pools. also began pining for my balcony in Trabzon, not to have to pay them. Although Uzbek law guarantees bathed in spray thrown up from the Black Sea. In compari- the right to paid leave, have been surprised to encounter son to Turkey, Tashkent started to feel stifling, a bottled- many people unwillingly at leisure in this way, usually for up heat trap situated in the middle of the Eurasian land- 24-26 days- from civil servants and state bank officials to mass. Uzbekistan is not merely land-locked it is the sole theater administrators and even a group of men met on country on the planet all of whose neighbors are land- the metro who turned out to be disgruntled (i.e. unpaid) locked as well. workers at Tashkent's Chkalov Aircraft Factory, once fa- mous throughout the USSR and the corridors of the Penta- Imprisoned in the empty heart of a vast continent! gon for its gigantic cargo planes (especially the Ruslan, the How one can long sometimes for a breath of sea breeze, IL-76, and the IL-114). asked the men how they intended or any gentle movement of air whatsoever to cool the to spend their month of involuntary vacation. Deprived of brow! But when wind does come, it brings its own brand the Black Sea, they would be searching out the life-giving of punishment. The only sea breezes available in Uzbeki- element closer to home: perhaps riding the busses to stan, unfortunately, are draughts of airborne salts like so- "TashMor" ("Tash-Sea'), a large lake on the outskirts of dium sulfate and man-made poisons blowing off the eco- the city; or farther afield to Chimgan; or to the Chatkal logically dead Aral Sea, asphyxiating the Karakalpak Mountains in order to bathe in the Charvak dam- population in the northwest of the country.

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